


Out of Darkness

by harrycrewe



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Mirror Universe, Mirrorverse, Noncon (not explicit)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-22
Updated: 2014-03-22
Packaged: 2018-01-16 12:52:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1348114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harrycrewe/pseuds/harrycrewe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mirrorverse!AU. A very loose retelling of Into Darkness, in which Khan is the Captain of the I.S.S. Enterprise, Kirk is his slave, and Bones is just struggling to get by.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> [Korean Translation](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12958365%20) by [WwwsBryce](http://archiveofourown.org/users/WwwsBryce/pseuds/WwwsBryce%20)

It began on the day that Jim Kirk fought Jorsh Qureshi. Although Leonard had been aware of Kirk before then: rumours travelled like wildfire aboard the Enterprise, even when they were about the Captain and could result in time in the agonizer booth for the man caught spreading them.  Leonard hadn’t been aboard the _Enterprise_ for a week before he’d heard whispers about the _normal_ human the Captain had been keeping close. Jim Kirk was reportedly good looking and amusing, but also could be mouthy and disrespectful to senior members of the crew. “But they have to take it,” Leonard had heard one of the bridge lieutenants mentioning to another, “because Khan is the only one allowed to put Kirk on his knees.”

He had felt sorry for the boy (because Leonard thought of anyone even two or three years younger than he was as a boy) then. He had assumed he was a kid in over his head. Maybe Kirk didn’t want to be at Khan’s feet and in his bed, or maybe he did: the world had a way of making people want crazy things for a chance at power. Leonard couldn’t do anything for him either way. He was just a ship’s physician – a drafted man and not an enlisted one – and only a third generation meta-human, which was the same as being a second-class citizen.  He had enough difficulty keeping his own head down and out of trouble without worrying about anyone else’s.

Until one afternoon in the rec room: a time of day when the space was usually nearly deserted; also when the med bay was quietest. Barring a run of patients in the morning, Leonard could get through his paperwork and still slip in a run before dinner.  He had entered as usual: changed into his workout clothing, set the timer on the treadmill for forty minutes, put in a set of earplugs, and pulled up his backlog of medical articles to read as he jogged. In fact, he became so caught up in them that he didn’t notice when a crowd started to form at the other end of the rec room, not until someone jostled his treadmill as they hurried over.

“What the..?” Leonard muttered as he took out his plugs and flicked off the screen of his pad. The occupants of the room had swelled to fifty or sixty individuals, concentrated around the boxing ring that crew members also used for martial arts. Sports related to hand-to-hand combat were particularly prized in the Empire, but they had never been Leonard’s forte, and he had been relieved when he finished the mandatory Krag-to-Ack and Brazilian jiu-jitsu sessions at the Academy.  On the Enterprise, especially in the downtime between battles when the crew started to get bored, impromptu matches were popular, often with a bit of betting on the side. The officers looked the other way, sometimes even when things got so rough that a participant was seriously injured. It was also a form of bullying; at times one or a few men would gang up on another, forcing them to fight repeatedly until whatever disagreement between them was solved to the satisfaction of the stronger party. After a few years in the Imperial Service, Leonard had learned better than to complain about constant trickle of broken bones and occasional knife wounds that made their way into his sickbay: he patched them up as best he could, and kept as silent as the grave about the matter, unless a superior officer came asking for information.

When he saw that the fight shaping up in the rec room looked like a rough one, Leonard’s first impulse was to leave quietly, lest the situation devolve into a melee.  But then he saw a glimpse of blond hair in the slightly elevated ring, and his curiosity got the better of him. He had heard the rumours about Kirk, he knew he was a normal. And the other man in the ring, Qureshi, was one of the ship’s security officers – bred for strength and speed even beyond the usual level. It was a recipe for disaster, and in spite of Leonard’s instinct towards self-preservation, he grabbed his gym bag from the floor next to his machine, checked to confirm that his medical tricorder was packed inside, and crept forward to see what the fuss was about.

Kirk and Qureshi were circling each other in the ring. Both had stripped down to their pants and undershirts, Kirk had a red ring over his cheekbone that Leonard was pretty sure would settle in a few hours into a black eye.  He was sweating hard. Qureshi, in contrast, was moving smoothly, and he looked smug: comfortable and in control of the situation.

“Don’t do it, Jorsh,” shouted someone from the crowd, “the Captain will have your balls.”

Jorsh appeared to hear the advice, because he paused in his slow circling around the normal, but Kirk brought him back with a quick taunt, “that’s right, Jorsh, better back off.”

Qureshi looked angry. “The Captain will side with me, once he hears what you’ve done.”

Kirk cocked his head to the side, as if considering that. He smiled tauntingly. “I’m sure you’re right.” Then he said something else, too quietly for Len to catch from the back of the crowd. It must have been ugly, though, because it caused Jorsh to charge forward with more speed but less grace than Leonard would have been expected from him. Kirk held his stance until the last minute – but then dropped and slipped, so that Jorsh tripped and toppled towards the force-field reinforced edge of the ring. He balanced himself and turned fast, though – so fast that Leonard caught his breath – and slammed into Kirk with a blood choke that was definitely illegal.  No one in the crowd moved to stop him, though, even when Kirk’s face began to look dangerously red.

Leonard was at the point of raising his voice and muscling through the crowd when Jorsh’s grip seemed to weaken.  He lifted his hands away from Kirk’s neck and then slumped forward.  For a moment he was on top of Kirk, and then Kirk scrambled out from under him and back onto his feet. Jorsh followed.

“What did you do to me?” Jorsh slurred.

Kirk smiled wickedly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Jorsh charged him again, but this time it was slower, and Kirk feinted easily. His next strike was a tactically precise, textbook knee hook that brought Qureshi down with a thud.

“You aren’t actually sedated, you know,” Kirk said. “It’s just a mild hormone blocker. It brings you right about to the level of,” he cocked his head, “a normal human.”  He circled Jorsh comfortably. “But then, you’ve always gotten by on your size and your strength, so that might be a challenge, huh?”

“Qureshi’s been bothering Rand,” one of the redshirts next to McCoy whispered to his friend. “I don’t know where Kirk got the idea that he had enough power on this ship to tell someone like Jorsh what he could and couldn’t do…”

Scrappy kid, Leonard thought, watching the way Kirk’s blue eyes tracked Jorsh’s movements. Something about his gaze was like Khan’s – that clinical assessment that suggested total control of the situation – but something about it was different that Khan, too. For one thing, his eyes were bright with excitement, not cool or detached like the Captain’s.

Blue eyes were unpopular, had been for over a century. They suggested a lack of genomic diversity that, like that of a too-purebred dog, the general public tended to associate with decreased evolutionary fitness. It was a pity, McCoy thought. They sure were striking.

Jorsh got up and charged again, and this time Kirk dropped and executed a smooth kick that took Jorsh’s legs out from under him. Then, quicker than Len could track, he was on top of Jorsh, executing a strike that had some in the crowd drawing their breath: not from the brutality of it, but the unexpectedness. Jorsh’s body lurched and then sagged: Kirk had knocked him out. 

 

 

The crowd suddenly became aware of the danger of lingering, no one wanted to become involved in Kirk’s problems, or Jorsh’s, when the officers became aware of the fight. Those who were on-duty security stepped forward, reluctantly, to apprehend Kirk. Everyone else, include Len, slunk away.

He retreated to his quarters for a quick sonic shower, and then returned to the med bay to begin sorting through the day’s paperwork. He was slightly surprised when, not an hour after he arrived, the same security detail that had dragged Kirk away from the gym, dragged him into the med bay.

He didn’t look notably worse than he had at the end of his fight with Jorsh, Len noted with a critical eye.

“What happened?” He asked the goons. “Captain didn’t see fit to punish him?”

“The Captain just laughed,” one of the two answered. “And when Jorsh complained that Kirk had cheated by drugging him, he gave him six hours in the agonizer. He said Jorsh should have been smart enough to guess what tricks a normal human like Kirk might get up to. Here,” he added, throwing Kirk down on the nearest bio bed. “Fix him up. Captain wants him ready to go by the end of alpha shift.”

McCoy stifled a sigh and turned for his medical tricorder.  “Out, out,” he told them impatiently.

“We’ll be back to collect him ten minutes before beta.”

“Fine.”

They turned and went, and McCoy began running his scanner over the kid’s body. He soon identified two broken ribs and a lot of bruising, but nothing more severe. Len debated for a moment turning the work over to Chapel, as it was well within her professional capabilities, but knowing how closely the Captain seemed to value Kirk, he decided against it.

He administered a light sedative and an osteoblast stimulant, and then set to work on the ribs; easiest done when the patient was unconscious. The fractures weren’t bad, but as he moved the scanner down over Kirk’s ribs he saw the tell-tale bands on the bone left by past breaks. He counted six before he gave up, slightly depressed by the exercise. These normal humans weren’t made to take same punishment that Augments were.

As he concluded the regen on the second rib, Kirk’s eyelids began fluttering, and then opened. His gaze seemed blurry for a brief moment, and then it was focused acutely on Len. His hand shot out to grab Len’s wrist, pulling it back from where he’d begun his final dose of radiation above the bone. Len froze. For a moment they stared each other down, and then Kirk seemed to realize where he was, and loosened his grip.

“Doctor,” he said.

“That’s right,” Leonard agreed. “I’m McCoy, second medical officer on this ship for the past six months. I don’t think we’ve previously had the pleasure, Mr. Kirk. I’m just fixing you up now,” he added, by way of a warning, “and then you’re to see the Captain at the end of alpha shift.”

Kirk let his head fall back against the biobed. “Thanks,” he said, “good to know.”

Leonard switched out his osteo-enhancer for his general medical tricorder, and began to get to work on Kirk’s bruising. He went for the deeper, internal bruising first, before moving towards Kirk’s split lip, and the black eye forming around his eye.

His eyes really were blue, he thought as he worked. He glanced at them, and saw that Kirk was watching him back. Kirk smiled as if amused. Leonard didn’t smile back, but reached for the last hypospray he had waiting.

“Ow,” Kirk complained, slapping his neck. “What was that?”

“Vitamins.”

“Didn’t feel like vitamins.”

Leonard frowned.  “A little bit of a booster,” he admitted, “to get you through the next couple of hours. It would be better if you rested, but I thought you might need it.”

“Thanks,” Kirk said slowly, still rubbing his hand absently over the place where the hypospray had landed. “You’re new to the _Enterprise_ ,” he added.

McCoy looked at him. “Before this, I was on the _Indefatigable.”_

“Captain Monash’s ship,” Kirk paused.  “They broke the crew up after he rebelled against Admiral Yang, didn’t they? So what do you think about the _Enterprise_ -the legendary Khan? Have you decided whether or not he’s the real deal yet?”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Leonard said neutrally.  He looked up at the sound of the med bay doors sliding open: the goons had returned.  “Looks like your ride’s here.” 

 

 

Afterwards he went to the dining hall for dinner, with the intention of grabbing a tray to take back to his quarters.  But the whole hall was babbling over Jorsh and Kirk’s fight, and, curious against his better judgement, McCoy sought out a table with the chief medical officer Dr. M’Benga instead.  When he sat down, the man was deep into a conversation about Kirk’s genetic history.

“So why didn’t the family just augment?” MBenga asked.

The engineer he was conversing with, an Augment from one of the old families, replied sniffily, “His parents were part of the anti-modification movement that was popular a few decades back. They were eventually arrested and sent to Tarsus. I suppose that’s why Kirk refuses even the minor augmentations that can still be done on an adult: he’s allergic to all kinds of things, apparently, which could easily be fixed with a little bit of work.”

M’Benga nodded in agreement and turned to Leonard, “did you treat him today?”

Cognizant of the need to repay a bit of gossip, Leonard relayed what he knew of the Captain’s response to the whole event.

“And it was all over Janice Rand, then, wasn’t it?”

“You’d think she’d have more respect for herself, than to be defended by a normal.”

“She’s pretty low on the pecking order these days,” the engineer commented, “since the first officer passed her off to that lieutenant. If she doesn’t find another protector soon, the whole ship’ll be on her.”

“Do you think she’s Kirk’s woman?”

“Couldn’t be,” He shook his head, “Khan would’ve killed her himself.”

Len sipped his coffee and tried not to look uneasy. His pedigree and his connections weren’t any better than Rand’s, and if it hadn’t been for his officer’s status and for the fact that everyone was wary of the medical personal – after all, anything could happen when you were out under anesthesia – he might not have been any better off. He had no idea what had possessed her to join the fleet in the first place – if in fact she had joined voluntarily and not been impressed as Len had been – but her dalliance with the First Officer, when it ended badly, had left her in a precarious position, a plaything and a chess piece for the more powerful aboard.

 

 

Things quieted down soon enough, however, and Leonard had begun to forget about the incident, when one night on a quiet gamma shift, the med bay doors opened and Kirk appeared again. This time, he was alone.

“Dr. McCoy,” he said.

“What can I do for you?” Len asked, cautiously.

“Oh, nothing,” Kirk replied, airily. “I just came to say thank you for your help the other day.”

Leonard was perplexed. He watched as Kirk wandered around the sickbay, waiting for the other shoe to drop. But Kirk seemed disinclined to say more, and finally Len decided to ask a question that had been bothering at the corner of his mind.

“That hormone blocker you gave Qureshi,” he asked. “Where did you get that?”

Kirk looked at him then, eyes bright. “Where do you think I got it?”

Leonard shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. It’s a banned substance outside of sickbay… but it’s a simple compound, easily synthesized by the medical replicators. I checked the log, and the logs of the dining hall replicators, to see if they’d been tampered with. But everything seemed to be in order.”  That was where he had dropped his investigation, aware that to do anything more would risk drawing attention. “The Captain must know where you got it,” he repeated the conclusion he’d already come to, “so it really isn’t any of my business.”

“As a matter of fact,” Kirk jumped up to sit on one of the empty biobeds. He grinned rakishly at McCoy, “Khan doesn’t know. Well, he thinks he knows, of course… but he may have been slightly misled.”

Leonard glanced involuntarily towards the corner of the room, where audio and visual from the sickbay was constantly being recorded.

Kirk followed his gaze. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he sounded bored, “it’s being looped through a filter, just at the moment. Later on, if security notices, they’ll think a glitch corrupted the data stream.”

This was more than dangerous, Leonard realized. It was treasonous. It could get both of them hours in the agoniser booth, if not worse. He felt sweat breaking out on his forehead.

And yet Kirk didn’t seem concerned at all. Just now, as he sat swinging his legs over the side of the biobed, he looked like a cheerful teenager. Startled by the discrepancy between the image he was projecting, and his words, Len wondered suddenly if he was dealing with some kind of a psychopath: the sort that that liked to play with others, luring them towards destruction. Jupiter knew there were enough such personalities in the fleet.

“Why are you telling me this?” he croaked.

Kirk’s expression grew more serious. “After you healed me, I did some asking around,” he said. “I was surprised to find how many people are afraid of you. They say that you know everything about poisons. That you killed a lieutenant last year, on the _Indefatigable_ , and Monash let you walk.”

That wasn’t quite right, but as the rumor had provided Leonard a much-needed layer of protection aboard the _Enterprise_ , he had never bothered to correct it.  He spoke carefully. “Lt. Gaurav died after a phaser boost to the heart; it couldn’t be re-gened in time.”

“I think he did, too,” Kirk said unexpectedly, and then cocked his head at McCoy and smiled. “I think you may be a sheep in wolf’s clothing, Dr. McCoy.”

 “What do you mean?”

“A genuine, old-fashion sawbones who still believes in the Hippocratic oath.”

Leonard shook his head. He glanced upwards again, to the recording devices that were supposedly being interrupted. “So what if I am?”

“So,” Kirk jumped off the ship and came to stand close to McCoy, “I made the hormone suppressant using the replicator in the Captain’s quarters. But the Captain thinks that I got it off a crewman. Soon he’ll discover that that crewman got it from an officer, who got it from the CMO, who, coincidentally, really has been replicating that drug, combined with a muscle relaxant and a neuroleptic sedative, in a cocktail that he provides free of charge to several of his friends aboard. I think we both know what they might want with something like that.”

Leonard’s stomach turned, “If you can tell me how to prove that-”

“It’s not necessary,” Kirk said. The tips of his mouth turned upwards sardonically. “Khan is very persistent, and he has much less tolerance for this type of petty corruption than most officers in the fleet. I would keep my distance from M’Benga for the next few days, if I were you. Better not to give them any suspicion that you might have been involved.

With that, Kirk left. Leonard spent the next several hours trembling, waiting for security to come and haul him up. But no one came. When, eventually, he used the guise of reviewing his day’s notes to ask the computer to recite the complete patient roster, Kirk was conspicuously absent. There was no record of him having entered the sickbay at all. Instead, the ship’s record showed that McCoy had been alone the whole time, checking the calibration of a malfunctioning medical tricorder.

 

 

Over the next few days, he watched Chief Medical Officer M’Benga closely. It had occurred to him, among many other thoughts during the last several hours, that M’Benga had been taking gamma shift frequently as of late, and assigning his lackeys to it as well. That seemed strange, as most officers preferred alpha or beta, when they had sufficient power to choose their own schedules. Len was unusual in that respect, preferring gamma for the peace and quiet.

Sure enough M’Benga seemed tense, devoid of his usual swagger. Leonard watched him berate nurses over simple problems, even sending one to the agonizer for an hour after she made a minor inventory error. Leonard watched her limping brokenly around the sickbay the next day. He found himself following Kirk’s advice to keep M’Benga at a distance, at least until whatever drama might be underway played itself out.

At the end of the week, he arrived on alpha shift to find that the CMO was absent and the nurses worriedly crowded into a corner, whispering.

“What’s happened?” Leonard barked.

The nurses looked at each other. Finally Chapel spoke up, “security’s taken Chief Officer M’Benga.”

Leonard nodded, taking that in. The nurses stood, studying his reaction. He could see from their expressions that most were scared, seeking reassurance that whatever had gotten the CMO into trouble wouldn’t follow them, but the ambitious ones were trying to gauge whether he might be involved somehow, and the one or two who were closest to M’Benga looked recalcitrant and defensive.

It was never a good idea to say too much.

“Well, get to work, then.”

Chapel looked at him, “they also said you’re to report to the Captain at eleven-hundred hours.”

He must have paled, but Leonard was proud that he kept his posture straight and his face expressionless. He nodded again, “noted.”

It was o-nine-hundred hours just then. He sat down at his desk, and began to arrange his work for the day: his pad of the day’s experiments, and his roster of scheduled patients, all blocked with enough just leeway to allow time for one or two potential walk-ins. The nurses continued watching him quietly. He knew what they were wondering: if M’Benga had been taken, would he soon be gone too?

He tried not to give anything away with his behavior. He arranged his materials as if it were a normal day, saw one patient, and then, when the appointment finished at ten minutes to eleven, left sickbay and took the turbolift to the bridge and the Captain’s ready room.

The Captain’s yeoman manned the door. He was one of Khan’s men, part of the select group that had come aboard with Khan when he had taken command of the Enterprise. There were about sixty of them, although according to rumor, there had once been more. Khan claimed to be _the_ Khan, reawakened with his crew after their ship had been discovered at the edge of known space, where it had drifted for centuries after they had fled the Earth, believing, mistakenly, that the crusade of the Augments against the normal humans was on the verge of defeat. Whether this was the truth or just some kind of bizarre story invented to enhance the Captain’s frightening image was anyone’s guess. In keeping with the narrative, however, Khan’s men wore old-fashioned uniforms and tended to speak in a classical Standard un-peppered with the modern vocabulary that had snuck into the language of late, through contact with other races. They rarely interacted with the rest of the crew, and they were fiercely, fanatically loyal to Khan.

“Second Medical Officer Leonard McCoy to see you, Sir.”

The first thing Leonard noticed that there were no Security Officers in the ready room. The second was Kirk. The Captain was sitting behind his desk, and Kirk knelt on the floor beside him. He was bare-chested, and had a gag in his mouth. When Leonard entered, he looked up briefly. Leonard could have sworn that he winked.

 Khan gestured towards a chair. “Sit, Doctor McCoy.”

Leonard sat.

The Captain appeared to be a fairly young man, but given that he was Highly Augmented, there was no way to be sure of his true age. He was slim, with a high forehead and a slightly hooked nose. His skin was unusually pale for an Augment. He seemed to be ignoring Kirk. Leonard thought that he ought to do the same, and so he tried not to look at the boy.

“Dr. McCoy,” Khan said. “I don’t believe we’ve previously had the pleasure.”

“No, Sir.”

“You’ve been six months aboard my ship.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“And before that you were aboard Monash’s.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The Captain looked at Leonard critically.  It felt like being turned inside out. “M’Benga’s no longer the Chief Medical Officer,” he said. “You’re promoted. Dismissed.”

Leonard coughed. “Sir?”

“Dismissed.” Khan repeated, sounding annoyed.

Leonard got up and stumbled out, to where the same yeoman was still stationed.  He looked at the man in confusion.

“What happened?” He asked. 

The yeoman shrugged at him. “The Captain asked me to investigate,” he said, and there it was, just a hint of a lilting, Old-Earth accent.  “He didn’t approve of what M’Benga was up to. Run a clean sickbay, and you’ll go farther than the previous CMO.”

He passed Leonard a PADD, which he saw at a glance contained details regarding his new position.

“Thank you,” Leonard said.

Mockingly, the yeoman saluted.

 

 

The next several weeks were spent working at a frantic pace, as Leonard struggled to take control of and reorganize the ship’s sickbay. M’Benga hadn’t been killed, merely agonized for days and demoted, along with those who had been involved in the affair with him. Leonard was worried that he wouldn’t easily hand over control, but extended periods in the agonizer had a way of taking the fight out of most people. M’Benga’s nerves were too shattered to do much of anything at first, and McCoy set himself to separating the most dangerous personalities and looking for the members of the medical staff that he trusted most.

It was during this period when Kirk appeared yet again. Again, he came on gamma, when no one else was on duty, and again, he came alone. 

“Congratulations on your promotion.”

Leonard had raised an eyebrow, “good lot of trouble, is what it is.” He paused, weighing his next words. “You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?”

Kirk raised an eyebrow, “of course not.”  Then, seeing McCoy’s skeptical expression, he added, with a touch of bitterness, “trust me, the Captain isn’t interested in hearing my opinion about personnel changes. I made sure he found evidence of what M’Benga was up to, that’s all.”

Leonard digested this thoughtfully.

“You’re still working gamma shift?” Kirk asked.

He sighed as he answered. “I’m a night owl,” he said. “And some of my experiments require round-the-clock observation, anyhow.”

Kirk glanced over at the lab bench, “may I?” And at Leonard’s grudging nod he began strolling around, glancing at the various experiments in progress.  Although Leonard’s research interest was in the cure for various toxins, rather than their invention, it was true that he knew a great deal about poisons. He was, just at that moment, working on developing an antidote for particularly damaging neurotoxin. His test subjects, a half dozen tribbles kept in isolated glass cages, reproduced themselves at a rate at almost the rate at which he sacrificed them for his experiments.

Kirk looked at the tribbles interestedly. He glanced at Len.

“Can I pick one up?”

Leonard was bemused, but he nodded again. Kirk reached into the cage to take one of the tribbles. He held it gingerly in his hands for a moment, and then the tribble began to purr. Unexpectedly, Kirk laughed.

“Interesting creature,” he said, turning to McCoy.

“Don’t get attached,” Leonard warned him. “I’ve just injected it with a neurotoxin.”

Kirk returned it to its cage. “What’s the purpose of that?”

Leonard shrugged. “It’s a new chemical from Andor. You can’t just study these things under a microscope, you need to see how they act on a living body. The results aren’t always what theory would suggest.”

“Yes,” Kirk said, looked perplexed. “But a tribble isn’t very much like a human, is it? I mean, we come from totally different planets.”

“Ah,” Leonard said. “Well, that’s true enough. As a matter of fact, I augment them before I infect them.”  He cast a glance at Kirk, to see if he followed. “The human empire has been manipulating genetic material since the twenty-first century: our science in this area is the best in the known universe. The tribble may look like a tribble, but it’s been genetically modified, its biological processes altered so that it’s much like a tiny, furry human. Metabolically, of course,” he added. “It doesn’t have the intelligence of a human being, or anything like that.”

Kirk nodded slowly. He was making a slow circle around the tribble cages, inspecting them one at a time. “You change them in utero?” He asked.

“Well, yes.” Leonard said. “Or after, although the changes that can be successfully implemented at that stage are more limited.”

“Why does this one have the First Officer’s i.d. number on the cage?” Kirk tapped the glass.

Leonard wondered if he should answer, but decided that it wasn’t classified information.  “Some of the tribbles are genetically manipulated to resemble specific individuals,” he said diffidently, “in order to create customized medicines.”

Abruptly, Kirk straightened, and moved away from the cages.  “As it happens, I’ve come to talk to you about something that’s not completely unrelated.”

“What’s that?” Leonard asked cautiously. Everything came with a price, he had learned, long ago. Kirk had helped him in the M’Benga business – perhaps now he was calling in the favor.

“You’ve heard, I suppose, that I’m normal - un-augmented.”

“Well, yes.”

“My parents chose not to augment me,” Kirk continued, “but they also – well, I won’t say chose – but circumstances forced them to spend most of my mother’s pregnancy on a ship in deep space, with inadequate shielding. I was born there,” he added.

“I see.”

“Do you?” Kirk threw his hands wide appealingly. “I’m allergic to dozens of things: both food and medical allergies. And I have a form of mild haemophilia and some genetic predispositions to cancers that an Augment would be completely protected against.” He came to the front of the lab space and looked at Leonard. “Could you fix that for me?”

Len blinked. “Are you sure?” he asked, “I don’t mean to pry, but – weren’t your parents part of the natural human movement?”

“What’s your point?” Kirk asked coldly.

Leonard looked at him, trying to think.  He hadn’t thought Kirk would ever want to be augmented; but then again, it wasn’t as if he knew the man well, and it was his choice. “Alright,” he said slowly. “It can be done, of course. I’ll need to take some samples now and begin work, but I see no reason why not.”

“Good,” said Kirk. He rubbed his hands together and the extended one, palm up, to McCoy, “take as much blood as you need.”

He extracted several milliliters, docking the tubes in a neat row in front of him on the lab bench. “I’ll do an initial gen-screen,” he told Kirk, “and run a couple of tests, and then it should be ready to go.  I should be ready by next week – say, five days from now – at 2:00 hours?”

“Gamma shift,” Kirk said. “Perfect.”

He turned towards the door.

“Just-” Leonard couldn’t stop himself, “why now?”

Kirk smiled in his mysterious way. “Hadn’t met a doctor I could trust.”

He left, and McCoy was left alone, looking at the four tubes of dark red blood in front of him, wondering if they would give him any insight into the man from which they had come.

 

 

Over the next few days he looked over Kirk’s genome, and his medical history, and used Kirk’s plasma to gene-code a couple of tribbles to use as test subjects.  When Kirk came in for his visit, Leonard showed him the results. 

“These ones have your allergies,” he explained, showing off the little gold-colored balls of fur. “I injected some with the drugs you’re allergic to, and they promptly dropped dead.  Now _these_ started off the same way, but once they reached adulthood I augmented them. Now they’re allergy free, although, unfortunately, the augmentation also seems to have led to some problems with their immune function. I believe your immune profile has compensated for your allergies by developing some unusual characteristics, so I’ve added some inhibitors to the hypospray, thus augmenting the tribble while retraining the immune system at the same time.”

“Interesting,” said Kirk, staring at the tribbles. “So these are all – me?”

“More or less,” Leonard agreed, “like I said, the point is that they mimic your genetic signature, so that I could test out the augmentations prior to using them on you. This,” he added, brandishing the hypospray he’d prepared. “Is your dose, all ready to go.”

“Right,” Kirk said. He looked at Leonard. “Look, doctor, I’m really sorry to say this when you’ve done so much work, but I’ve changed my mind.”

Leonard nodded. In fact, he wasn’t that surprised, he was quietly relieved. “If you don’t mind my saying so, I had thought you might.”

Kirk nodded ruefully. “The last time I spoke with you, I had just had an allergic reaction to something – it was on my mind.  But I’ve decided to live with my allergies a little longer.”

“Sure,” said Leonard, and then felt compelled to add, “I’ll keep the hypospray here, just in case.”

“Thank you,” said Kirk. “I would really appreciate that. Actually,” he paused, “can you do more than that?” Leonard must have looked confused, because Kirk picked up one of his genome-coded tribbles, and held it up. “Can I keep this one maybe? As a pet?”

Leonard shrugged. “I don’t see why not. Just don’t feed it more than once a week – the damn things are born pregnant, so the more food you give them, the more tribbles you’ll have on your hands. One feeding every five to ten shifts will keep her pregnancy dormant.”

“Great,” said Kirk. “No more than once per week, good to know.”

 

 

New members of the crew were starting to appear in sickbay: people Leonard had never seen there before. They only came on gamma shift, and only when Leonard was the only person there. They came with the kinds of injuries that crew members were often afraid to get treated. The aftermaths of beatings and sexual assaults: the patients who came to him wanted to be healed quietly, off the books, so as to avoid getting into trouble with the superior officers who were, more often than not, the source of the abuse. 

They seemed to know Leonard’s schedule even when he changed it around, or kept it up in the air until the last moment, but it wasn’t until Pavel Chekov and Gaila showed up that Leonard put the pieces together and realized that it all led back to Kirk. 

Pavel was a good-looking, under-aged Russian, and a normal besides: kids with that profile generally didn’t have an easy time of it in the Imperial fleet. But he came to sickbay not for himself, but with a friend, an Orion slave girl to one of the officers, who had left her injuries untreated for several days, forbidden from leaving the quarters of her master. The Captain had taken him, along with several officers, on an away mission that morning, but Leonard still didn’t know how Chekov and Gaila had managed the several corridors and turbolifts between the officer’s deck and the sickbay without anyone seeing her.

“Kirk said that you would help,” Chekov said, his voice low and urgent, but still polite. When Leonard looked at him, he smiled back. He seemed unafraid. Strangely enough, so did Gaila, the slave girl. When she poked at the deep green bruises on her abdomen, she appeared calm, even unworried about her injuries. He didn’t know what to make of it.

He repaired her broken collar bone and quenched the internal bleeding, but he left her superficial bruises prominently displayed, so that her officer wouldn’t notice what he had done. 

“We’re bred to take a beating,” she informed him quietly. “We don’t have the nerve endings or the sensitivity of a human, you see.” She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t tell, but the agonizer booth doesn’t feel like anything more than an itchy sensation, to me.”

“Gaila gets a lot of information for Kirk,” Chekov told him proudly. “Her master has a big mouth.”

Leonard sighed. “I don’t want to know anything about whatever trouble you or Kirk or anybody else is getting up to,” he told them firmly. “I’m a doctor, that’s all. Is that clear?” 

 “I don’t think that will be possible,” Gaila told him, “Jim’s already decided that you should join us... and Jim always gets what he wants.” She winked.

 

 

“So how’s your pet tribble?” Leonard drawled, the next time Kirk slipped into his sickbay.

Kirk raised an eyebrow at him, and Leonard felt his face growing red.

“Never mind,” he snapped. He could already feel a headache coming on, “what do you want this time?”

“To thank you for helping Gaila the other day.”

Leonard acknowledged it with a nod. “You kept it out of the sickbay records, I saw.” Jim nodded, and waited.  Leonard felt himself growing annoyed.  “You need to be careful, kid,” he said. “You’re playing with fire here.”

“You have no idea.”

“Don’t I?  I know it’s not just Chekov and Gaila. Who else on this ship are you friendly with? Scotty down in engineering – he came in the other day for something – and Sulu, even though he’s an augment, I’m thinking he’s one of yours too.” He looked at Kirk challengingly.  “Am I right?”

Kirk looked at him considering for a few moments, and then his blue eyes twinkled.  “Got me,” he said. “Or rather, yeah, both Scotty and Sulu are friends of mine, I guess you would call them.”

“Well, what are you doing with them?”  Leonard grumbled. “If the Captain finds out about this, it could mean trouble for everyone.”

Kirk nodded.  “I’m careful,” Kirk promised, “we all are.”

“Well good.” Against his will, Leonard knew that he liked Kirk- and Chekov, and Gaila, and the others. He wondered how the Captain could be oblivious to the obvious fact that Kirk, full of frightening intelligence and boundless energy, would inevitably get into trouble when left on his own for long hours aboard the ship.  Surely Khan would have been wiser to find some work for Kirk, to occupy his time and attention.

“They said that Gaila gathers information for you,” he said, almost unwillingly.

“Yes,” Kirk said. “Not only that. Her former master was one of the engineers who designed the Enterprise. Gaila is a technopath, and she learned a lot more from him than most people realize. These days, very little goes on aboard this ship that she can’t find out about.”

Leonard felt uneasy.  “Why?” he asked finally. “What are you all up too?”

“Are you sure you want to know?” Kirk asked.

Leonard made his decision.  “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, tell me.”

Kirk frowned and crossed his arms across his chest. “It goes back to that conversation we were having the other day, about augmentation.”

“Ok.”

Kirk smiled at him. His smiles weren’t genuine, Leonard thought, but whether they were a blind for his real feelings, or just expressed a kind of amusement at the world at large, he couldn’t say. “I don’t know if you’re aware,” continued Kirk, “but the Enterprise has the largest number of normal crew members of any ship in the Imperial fleet.”

Leonard blinked slowly. 

“It’s interesting, isn’t it? We have all of Khan’s twenty-first century Supermen aboard, considered by some to be the premiere Augments, the best the Empire has ever created. And then we have a smattering of others, typical Imperial sons and daughters trying to crawl up the ranks, and the people like you, the second- and third-generation meta-humans who are mostly conscripted. Last of all there’s me, and the others like me, who are completely normal. Most Captains try to keep their ships clean of normal humans. So tell me, Doctor,” he crossed his arms over his chest, “why do you think the _Enterprise_ is collecting us instead?”

The question was intriguing. “Khan is a bit of a dark horse,” Leonard said, slowly. “When he appeared a few years ago – woken from deep cryostasis, I guess they say – some people were excited to see him, but a lot weren’t.”

“Exactly,” Kirk said. “But there he was: the legendary hero of the eugenics war, come back to Earth with his legendary crew. How could they say no to him? They gave him the ship that he demanded, but his original crew wasn’t large enough to run a ship the size of the _Enterprise_ , and so, to fill in the gaps, they sent him a lot of people that nobody else wanted, too. People that are considered untrustworthy like you, by virtue of having been on the _Indefatigable_ when Monash made his move against Yang. Or people like me, who represent a problem because of my family history and my genetic makeup. Or Pavel Chekov, who’s one-hundred percent unaugmented, just like me, but also certifiably a genius. He comes from a small city in Siberia that hasn’t produced anything but fourth-rate Augments for several generations. Isn’t it interesting that the children of the normal underclass have started to out-perform the elite on all sorts of measures of intelligence, and even physical fitness?” he paused, “and why are Khan and his crew, meta-humans that were supposedly engineered by Singh back in the dark ages, better than the Augments we can create now, with so much more technology available to us?”

Leonard sighed. “This is just speculation,” he said. “Most of the medical profession still isn’t willing to admit that there are problems with augmentation. But, if you want my guess,” he shrugged his shoulders. “The truth is that even now, there’s a whole lot about the workings of the human genome that we don’t understand. Mapping it isn’t the same thing as understanding what every piece does, or how those pieces fit together. Back with Khan was created, they thought 98% of the genome was junk, bits of DNA left over from evolution that we don’t even use anymore. Well, we all know how wrong that was.”

“So?”

“So we’ve made some mistakes. Augments these days don’t have the genetic diversity that was once normal to the human race. We’ve engineered ourselves in-bred, you might say. And there are characteristics that we know are related, but we don’t understand fully why. Singh modified humans to give them superior strength, but it also made them more aggressive. Increased intelligence came with increased paranoia. On average, we’re more competitive and less cooperative than normal humans - there’s some theory that that’s why Earth’s never had a successful democratic society since the end of the Eugenics war, but kept to the Imperial model instead.” Kirk nodded. “Now, I’m not saying that augmentation doesn’t work” Len cautioned. “It can prevent a child from dying of a genetic disease, or make a man who would have lived to a hundred live to a hundred and fifty instead. It’s just that what’s good for the individual isn’t always good for group.” Leonard had become lost in his musings, but now he looked up.  “But what does this have to do with the normal humans above the _Enterprise?”_

Kirk nodded, “the point is that most people don’t think much about the normal members of this crew, but I have. I know who they are, and what they can do. And there’s no life for anyone here in the Empire: not for the normal humans and not even for most of the Augments. Hell, if what you’re saying is right, maybe the whole Empire is only a few generations away from collapse. But we can’t wait that long.

I don’t know if you’ve heard the rumors, but the Federation- the Vulcans and the Andorians, and the other races that have joined them – are taking in human refugees. There’s even a planet that’s been set aside for human settlement, one with a similar climate to Earth, that’s being terraformed with Earth fauna.  So we’re getting out of here. As soon as the opportunity presents itself, we’re going to go there.”

Leonard felt his veins turning to ice. He had no idea what he had expected out of Kirk, but it wasn’t this. This – this was a level of imagination, of daring, far beyond what Leonard had ever allowed himself to dream of. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”

“Yes,” Kirk said. “But I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I have a plan. We just need to wait until the right moment. It’ll be a mission that takes us in the neutral zone, close to Federation space. We’ll take control of the ship and make a break for the border.”

Leonard could only shake his head in disbelief.  “Take over a shuttle? Are you joking? If one day you get lucky, and Khan lets you off your lead on a station that’s outside of the Empire, with a couple of credits in your pocket… well, you could run, I guess. You might get away. But everything else you’re saying, it’s impossible. It would get everyone killed. Khan would just blow you out of the sky.”

“I can’t leave on my own, I’ve made a promise. Not just to Chekov and Scotty, but to Gaila and Rand too. They’re slaves, Bones: they’ll never be able to slip away if we don’t help them. And,” Kirk’s eyes sparkled, “you misunderstood me just now. I didn’t say that I wanted to take control of a shuttle. I didn’t say _a_ ship, I said _the_ ship. I said that we’re going to take control of the _Enterprise_.”

Leonard could gape, and shake his head.  It took him a very long time before the fear pumping through his veins could be frozen into words. “That’s mutiny,” he said. 

Kirk just looked at him.

“I’ve been on a mutiny ship before. I saw what happened to Monash, and the members of his crew who were involved in that business. You don’t… you can’t imagine what they did to them.”

 “I read the reports; I know what happened, but-”

“It isn’t the same as seeing it with your own eyes _,”_ Leonard insisted. “I may not have liked those men, but I saw. They made us watch.”  He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I should never have asked you. You should never have told me. I can’t be any part of this anymore.” 

Kirk looked frustrated.  “We need you,” he said. “You’re a doctor. And do you think life is any better for you here in Empire? Even if you are an augment, you’re better off with us.”

Leonard just shook his head harder. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “You’re making a mistake. You’re going to get them killed. I won’t be a part of that.”

Kirk looked at him for a long time, and then he got up and walked closer to Leonard, until they were standing only a few inches apart. He brought his hands up Leonard’s shoulders.

“Bones,” he said. “Bones, I understand that you’re scared, but I’ve got this, really. You just have to trust me.”

Len let his head drop. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t.”

“Fine,” Kirk said, disappointed, “fine.”

Then he left Leonard alone.

 

 

Leonard thought about it carefully, and then made himself a geno-tagged toxin: fast-acting and coded to his own genome so that it would have no effect on other individuals and would appear invisible to a typical bioscan. He inserted a capsule containing it inside his cheek, so that if he bit hard enough to draw blood, it would flood his system. The toxin wouldn’t kill him then, but if he were exposed to an agonizer, or any other kind of torture, it would. 

It was something he’d been considering doing ever since he saw what had happened to Monash’s men, but now that he knew Kirk’s secret, it was more necessary than ever. He hated the thought that Khan might get a hold of him, and find out what Kirk and his conspirators had been up to because of Len. All of them were so young, and so full of potential. Maybe Leonard couldn’t help them, but he could at least try to protect them a little longer.

 

 

The latest orders from the admiralty had finally arrived. It was to be a long mission, six months patrolling the edge of the neutral zone, the long border than stretched between the Empire, Klingon, and Federation space, without a single planet fall, or anything more than the occasional stop at a remote military outpost. It was a dog’s job, the kind of work usually assigned to Captains and ships in disgrace, and since the Captain’s temper was legendary, everyone on the ship waited tensely for his anger over the insult to pass.

Unexpectedly, however, he accepted the order gracefully, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Leonard’s sickbay ran smoother and smoother. Oh, there was a lot to keep his eye on, but the better he knew his staff and the crew, the better he was able to keep stop trouble before it started. It was all a matter of promoting the best people, and keeping the troublemakers separated from each other: although it was Machiavellian, Leonard was learning the importance of keeping the more ambitious individuals competing against each other for his attention, rather than allowing them to join forces. M’Benga remained bitter and angry over his demotion, but Leonard kept him on the prestigious alpha shift, which allowed him the illusion of importance, while shifting beta to Chapel’s supervision and rotating between the three shifts himself.  Kirk’s ‘crew’, as Leonard had taken to calling them in his head, continued to appear with regularity only on safe shifts when they could be attended to off-the-record. Otherwise, Kirk respected his wishes and didn’t show up in sickbay again.

Until he did.

But this time it was different. Kirk arrived unconscious, bloodly, beaten to within an inch of his life. He was hauled in by two of the Captain’s inner crew, who dumped him onto a biobed and then stood, watching the entire time, as McCoy struggled to stop internal bleeding and repair broken bones.

“What happened?” He dared to ask them.  The two men didn’t answer.  Eventually, Kirk’s vitals were brought under control, and Leonard put him into a light coma to aid in his recovery. He had had an intercranial haemorrhage – bleeding to the brain – and there was still too much swelling for Leonard to see how much effect that had had. Perhaps it ended here, Leonard thought, all Kirk’s dreams, all his brave, fantastic plans.  This was the Empire did to people who dared to have vision.

Then the Captain appeared in sickbay.

“Sir!”

Everyone, including Len, snapped to attention. Having the Captain in the room was very like being in the room with a tiger. The tension, even from the two members of Khan’s inner crew, was palpable.

The Captain was dressed all in black, his typical, although non-regulation uniform. He came to stand at the end of the biobed and proceeded to looked Kirk up and down. 

“Is he stable?” he asked Leonard.

“Yes, sir.”

“No permanent damage?”

“Probably not, sir.”

“Probably?” Khan turned to stare at McCoy, his gaze was piercing.

“There may have been neurological damage. Once he wakes up, I’ll run some tests.”

“Wake him up now.”

Leonard hesitated.  “His brain needs to heal. If I interrupt the process by waking him now, it may lead to permanent damage.”

Khan was expressionless, but then he nodded slowly. “People don’t contradict my orders often, Doctor,” he said, his deep voice sounding amused. “You’re the second person today to do so.”

Leonard didn’t ask who the first had been. Given Kirk’s mangled state, it was obvious.

“You aren’t afraid of me, are you, Doctor?”  Khan asked musingly.

“I am, Sir.” Leonard said honestly.

“You are,” Khan nodded, “but you aren’t as afraid as you should be. Something has infected you… someone has given you hope. Who was it?” He had begun his question quietly, by the end he was nearly yelling.

Leonard stood at attention, trying not to show any expression.

“I don’t know, Sir.”

Khan growled. “Useless crew,” he said. “Why does my whore have more bravery than anyone else on this useless ship? Useless crew, useless ship, useless Empire. If I had known that this would be my legacy, I would have burned the Earth to the ground long, long ago, rather than let these pitiful, poor copies of me take over the galaxy. Come on!” He yelled, turning abruptly. His two crew members followed stoically behind him.

Leonard resisted the temptation to fall to his knees.  The rest of the staff, frozen in fear at the arrival of the Captain, began to move about and speak quietly.  Only Kirk, still asleep, his handsome face now healed of cuts and bruises, appeared calm.

 

 

It was only much later that night that Kirk was brought out of his coma. Leonard timed it carefully, so that they would be alone. 

At first Kirk was groggy and disoriented. 

“It’s ok,” Leonard said, touching his wrist lightly. “It’s me, McCoy. You’re in sickbay. You’re safe now.”

“Bones,” Kirk’s lips lifted into a tiny smile, and then he opened his eyes. “It’s good to see you.”

“The Captain did a number on you.”

“Well,” Kirk sighed, looking up at the sickbay ceiling. “He was having a bad day. Sometimes that happens.”

“Is it… ” Leonard asked, and then stopped, and glanced at the cameras in the corners. Kirk looked at them too.

“Gaila,” he said. “Can you give us a minute?”

The light on the camera blinked twice, and then turned off.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Leonard said. “If you’re still – whatever it is you’re doing. Planning to get out of here. Count me in.”

Kirk smiled more widely. “You were never out, Bones.”

Leonard shook his head ruefully. “So,” he asked, “what do I have to do?”

“Nothing,” Kirk said. He rolled his eyes up, looking at the sickbay ceiling. Bones knew that every bone and muscle in his body must ache. “Nothing for now. For now, we just wait.”

 

 

Two weeks later, the Enterprise reached the part of the neutral zone where the Meta-human Empire, the Klingon Empire, and the Federation, met. Although from the recreation deck windows it looked just like any other point in deep space, it was delineated on the star charts by the intersection of a red, a green, and a blue triangle: the Enterprise appeared as a dot just on the side of human space.

Khan ordered the ship to pause there.  After several hours it became clear that they were waiting for something, but none of the enlisted men had any idea what. The captain’s inner circle kept their mouths tightly closed, as always, and, as the hours crept into days, the atmosphere aboard grew tense, and rumors began to circulate.  The ship hung in space for almost a week, with no word coming down the command chain, no reason why their orders had changed. 

One night Len went to the dining hall for a bite to eat and noticed something that disturbed him: a star that winked out of existence, only to reappear a few moments later. A minute later it happened to another one, and then to two more. It was almost like a small, dark spot was passing the ship and the stars: or maybe, Leonard told himself, he was just tired.  He had worked through part of the alpha shift, then the beta shift, and the gamma that came after. He rubbed his eyes, went back to his bunk and slept for almost fourteen hours.

When he awoke, it was to the news that a squadron of Klingon Bird of Preys had appeared off the starboard bow. No alarms had been sounded, and the encounter was not even officially announced. Leonard dressed rapidly, and then made his way back to the dining hall where, through the few external windows, the three warships was clearly visible, hanging in space only a few kilometers away. A crowd of other off-duty crewmen were doing the same thing.

“What are they doing there?” McCoy muttered. 

Chekov happened to be not far away, and he pulled McCoy away from the rest of the crowd. He spoke in a rapid, low whisper. “The bridge has been receiving and sending communications with the Klingons all day. The leader of the squadron is called Tharf.”

“Sounds like a sneeze,” muttered Leonard. Chekov giggled.

“Crew of the Enterprise,” the voice of Khan’s yeoman boomed from the ship’s comm. “Await an announcement from your Captain.”

Everyone rose, snapping to attention.

“Khan speaking,” came Khan’s voice. “I am speaking to inform you that we will be entering Federation space in the next thirty-six hours. Along with our ally, Commander Tharf, we will seize the Federation outpost _Rok-Tor_.  If the Vulcan colony refuses to surrender the outpost over to us, they will be destroyed. All marines will report for duty at thirteen-hundred hours. All hail to the glory of the Meta-Human Empire. All hail to the glory of the Klingon Empire.”

The comm cut abruptly, leaving the dining hall in startled silence.  A few crew members began to cheer uncertainly, and other glanced around, trying to gauge the reaction of those around them.

“That’s an act of war,” Leonard hissed, “against the _Federation_.”

“I know,” said Chekov.

“Why didn’t we know about this?”

“Khan says it was a secret order from the Emperor himself,” Chekov hissed. “No one was to know except Khan himself. We aren’t sure if Tharf is here on behalf of his own Empire, or if he decided to come on his own.”

“It smells, doesn’t it?” Leonard nodded towards the window. “One Imperial warship, and one squadron of Klingon Birds of Prey?  A small fleet to announce a war.”

Chekov nodded in agreement. “If taking on the Federation was an easy task, we would have attacked them long ago. I assume it’s the same for the Klingons. And yet there are many within each Empire who would welcome such a war.” He paused and added tentatively. “Maybe neither of us is acting with the full support of our Empires?” he gulped.

Leonard agreed. “Whatever’s happening, once we attack that base, it’s all over. The Federation will have no choice but to declare war, and then we’ll all be in the soup,” he paused, and then slapped Chekov on the shoulder. “We better both get to our stations. Good luck, kid.”

“Don’t worry, Sir,” said Chekov. “I’m sure Kirk will think of something.”

Leonard doubted it, but he didn’t want to take away Chekov’s hope. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe he will.”

 

 

He prepared for war according to the usual regulations. First, the hyposprays were prepared for the marines who would invade the outpost: stimulants, muscle boosters, and pain killers. Once the marines were dosed, they would be hopped up for days, ready to fight anything that moved. After that was done, a plan to deal with the wounded could be put into place: triage teams assigned and hypos with sedatives and coagulants lined up like soldiers themselves against the sickbay wall. 

It was going to be a disaster, Leonard was sure. He couldn’t understand it: although the Vulcans and Andorians were pacifists, their technology was a step ahead of both the Klingon and the Meta-Human Empires, no matter what the propagandists would have you believe. And if a war did break out, than Khan might be hailed as a hero, but he might just as easily be executed, along with everyone else aboard, for having pulled the Empire into a war they would have to struggle to win.  Leonard turned the questions over and over in his mind. All he could come up with was that Khan must know something that the rest of them didn’t.

At thirteen-hundred hours the marines were in their battle suits, moving into position in the Enterprise’s hanger bay, ready to be launched towards the Vulcan outpost as soon as the Enterprise brought down _Rok-Tor_ ’s shields.  Leonard was called to the bridge to report sickbay’s status:  he’d been working ever since the Captain’s announcement had been made, and he was half exhausted, half pumped full of adrenaline, too jittery to stand still for long.

“Chief Medical Officer McCoy reporting for duty, sir,” he said, saluting Khan as he arrived on the bridge and handed a PADD of his department’s precise status to the first officer. “Sickbay is ready, sir.”

Khan nodded once and then ignored him. Leonard hung back as the first officer reviewed his PADD.

“Commander Tharf hailing, sir.”

“On screen.”

“My crew and I are ready for battle,” snarled the Klingon. His face filled the whole screen.

“Good,” said Khan, deceptively calm, “my marines are ready as well. I’m sending you the recon coordinates now- ,” he nodded to his communications officer, but just then the ship lurched sharply. Leonard had the sensation that the thrusters had momentarily cut out.

“What was that?” Khan barked, sharply. When Leonard looked up at the screen, expecting to see the Klingon commander’s face, it had been replaced by black.

“I’m not sure, sir,” said the frightened lieutenant. “There was an explosion on deck six. It appears to have knocked out our communications array: and our sensors, and our shields. I’m not sure what else. I’m working on it.”

“Fix it.” Khan said, coldly furious. “And find out what happened, immediately.”

“It looks like the explosion was set off by a virus,” said the security officer, in his queer, old-Earth standard accent. He worked while he spoke, never looking up from his interface. “It must have been planted in advance. It’ll have to track down the rogue code and send a signal backwards to reverse it. ”

Everyone on the bridge had now long since forgotten about Leonard: and if there had been an explosion, he now realized, than the casualties would be on their way to sickbay. Leonard left.

The turbolift from the bridge to the sickbay floor was still working when Leonard got on, but three-quarters of the way down it froze. Luckily the emergency manual over-ride still functioned, and he was able to squeeze his way from the top of the turbolift, and then climb down the maintenance ladder the remaining five floors. When he arrived in sickbay, things were in chaos: the sickbay computers, which were supposed to be on a closed circuit, had somehow been infected by the virus and were off-line, while a number of burnt and bloody crew members were beginning to make their way in from the site of the explosion.

Leonard made use of the basic triage skills that any Imperial physician had drilled into them early and often. The hypos that had been prepped for the marines were useful for radiation burn victims as well. As he jumped into the fray, he barked orders to his nurses, causing them to fall into line. Then he worked quickly and efficiently, one patient after another, without really registering the faces of the injured: until suddenly the face in front of him was Kirk’s.

He looked terribly burnt: a patch of purpling blistered skin, on the point of peeling away, from his shoulder to his forearm. Leonard gasped, but in another moment he saw something funny about the situation. Kirk wasn’t in shock, for one thing, and for another, the color and the burns didn’t quite match the others coming in.

He glanced up at Kirk, who, audaciously, winked. “Just look like you’re working, Bones.”

“There are real men here who need help,” Len hissed furiously.

Kirk frowned. “I know,” he said, “and I’m sorry for that, but we have to go. Now!” he added, hissing urgently, when Leonard frowned.

“What? I can’t leave my post.”

Kirk looked about them quickly, “I shot an officer,” he said, “while I was setting that bomb off, just now. Once they catch on, that’s it for me here.”

“Fuck,” Leonard said, softly. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Come _on,_ Bones.”

Under the cover of getting Kirk into the operating theatre, they slipped out of sickbay together.

“This way,” said Kirk, pulling him down the hall. It was chaos, as crew members banged on panels, trying to force their controls to work, or forcing doors open with their hands, but every door in front of Kirk miraculously slid open, and the turbolift worked, leading them straight into an empty shuttle bay. Kirk made his way up the ramp, and the shuttle door slid open too, welcoming him.

Too surprised to question it, Leonard followed him into the shuttle. When Jim sat, he did too.

“What are we doing?” he asked, as they buckled themselves in. “This isn’t possibly going to work. What about the others? What’s going on?”

“All in good time, Bonesy,” Kirk said, and had the nerve to smile rakishly. Without having signalling the Enterprise, the shuttle bay door was opening.  Kirk fired up the thrusters, and then, abruptly, they were in space.

 

 

Leonard’s first sensation was that they were falling, and then, as the shuttle gravity boosters kicked on line, the shuttle lurched and he felt as though he was hanging. From the tightly confined space of the shuttle bay they were suddenly surrounded by immense space, quiet and black. Bones fought the urge to hyperventilate, which he nearly always did when confronted with the emptiness of it all.  It was hard to wrap his head around so many things happening at once. James Kirk had just set off a _bomb-_ and a virus - and they had stolen a shuttle.

They were going to die.

He expected, as soon as he was able to think at all, that Kirk would set a straight course for the Vulcan outpost, hoping to get away under cover of the chaos of the explosion and the virus. Instead, Kirk merely maneuvered the shuttle in a wide arc around the Enterprise. He seemed to be looking for something, because he was carefully triangulating his sensors, choosing the position of the shuttle with care. 

When he seemed to have decided where he wanted to be - a point midway between the Enterprise and the Bird of Prey – he stopped, and put the shuttle on autopilot.

“What’s happening?” asked Leonard, suspiciously.

Kirk unbuckled his seatbelt and got up. “Come on,” he said, “we haven’t got much time.”  He began pulling at the burn on his arm, which Leonard had, in the midst of their escape, almost somehow managed to forget.  It came away in one clean, black and purpling piece of skin: not real skin, Leonard realized, but regen, probably passed under a phaser set to a low setting before it had been pasted to Kirk’s arm.  Underneath it, his skin was white and clean. 

From the back of the shuttlecraft Kirk had started pulled out the emergency equipment. Finally he found what he appeared to have been lopping for: two regulation compression suits. He tossed one to Bones, and then immediately he began stripping, shucking his pants and pulling on the compression suit over his feet so quickly that it almost appeared to be a single motion.

“What?” He asked Bones, who was staring at him, surprised. Unexpectedly, he grinned, “you can look, if you want. As long as you move while you look.”

Flustered, Leonard started pulling off his own clothes, and putting on the compression suit. Initially, it seemed loose, easy to get into, but as soon as it was fully on it contracted, until it fit him like a glove, a thin layer surrounding his entire body.  Kirk passed him a helmet: Bones felt for the grooves in the base, where it would attach to the collar of the suit.

The shuttle must have intercepted the communication stream between the Klingon ships and the Enterprise, because Tharf’s voice, obscured by static, came on line. Kirk ran back towards the shuttle controls.

“Captain Khan, do you require assistance?” Asked the Klingon.

 “No, Commander,” answered Khan, “I regret that I must request a delay on our action -”

“You seem to have lost a _borghel,”_ Tharf sounded amused. “Did you notice? It flew out your window a little while ago. I can take him out of the sky for you, if you wish it. As a gesture of goodwill.”

“Thank you, but I’ll take care of my own,” Khan said pointedly, and then they lost the stream.

“Oh, well,” Kirk said. “They’ve got us now.”

They both waited, tensely. Leonard resisted looking at the shuttle readout: he couldn’t have said if 20 seconds, or 20 minutes, had gone by, before Khan hailed them.

“Kirk!”

“I think I won’t put his face on the screen, if it’s all the same to you,” Kirk whispered confidingly to Leonard.

“James T. Kirk,” Khan repeated. “You are hereby charged with treason against the First Human Empire. Return to the Enterprise at once to face your punishment.”

Kirk scoffed, and pressed his thumb on the communication array. “Khan,” he said. “You can burn in hell first.”

The Enterprise fired a shot across their bow.

“I guess their weapons system is back online, then,” Kirk frowned, and then punched a few coordinates into the shuttle’s console. “I’m sorry to do this to you, Bones,” he added.

“Eh, it’s alright,” Leonard tried to sound casual, although his hands had a death grip on his thighs, “at least I’m going out with a bang.”

“Definitely a bang,” Kirk agreed. Reaching up, he opened a panel above his head and flicked a large, red, switch. Surely, thought Leonard, that wasn’t be good sign.

“ _The reactor core will self-destruct in three minutes.”_

“What?” he asked, panicking, “What?”

“Just sit tight, Kirk told him. He was swinging the nose of the shuttle around, aiming it towards the Enterprise’s starboard nacelle and hitting the comm link again. “If I’m going down, Khan,” he yelled, “I’m taking you with me!”

Then he hit the thrusters, and the shuttle leapt forward. The Enterprise managed to get a few phaser shots off, but they were nowhere near the mark.  They were going to punch right through the Enterprise’s shields, Leonard thought dizzily, and when their core went off, they’d take out a good half the ship-”

“Whooooooooo!” Jim was yelling his lungs out, like he was on the best ride of his life. All Leonard could think was, this is it this is it this is it –

The pilot of the Enterprise had good hands, because the Enterprise had already started to roll away from the path of the shuttle. At the speed they were aiming for, Leonard was pretty sure, Kirk wouldn’t be able to steer the shuttle much at all. If they missed the Enterprise, they’d sweep past, and that would be their last chance to cause some damage –

as the Enterprise rolled away, a Warbird came into view. Suddenly it looked like they were on a collision course for the Klingon ship instead.  

“ _T-minus ninety seconds,”_ said the computer. The comm was picking up the Klingon-Enterprise communication again, and there were a string of curses on both ends, as the two pilots each struggled to avoid the shuttle, even at the expense of the other ship.

“Get your helmet on,” muttered Kirk, and Leonard hurriedly obeyed him. 

_“T-minus sixty seconds.”_

“Here we go,” said Kirk, and he shoved his own helmet into place and pushed a final key. A moment later Leonard was jettisoned out if his seat with such force that it felt he had been beamed by an old prototype transporter, all his molecules momentarily disassembled and reassembled in a brief, shocking burst of freezing water.

Next, he became aware that he was floating in space, with nothing now but that thin polymer membrane between his body and the void. Kirk was nearby, his breathing coming in over the comm heavy and right in Leonard’s ear. They watched in silence as the shuttle plunged forward. The Klingons and the humans both managed to maneuver away in time, and the shuttle slid harmlessly between them.  Leonard felt impossibly disappointed: they had missed their chance to do some damage.  A moment later the core detonated and the shuttle exploded, a bright flare against the darkness of the night.  

And then, unexpectedly, the flare seemed to catch, growing wider and wider, like ripples from a pebble thrown into a lake.

There was something out there. The shuttle must have hit it just before it exploded. As Leonard watched, the ripples increased in intensity, until they outlined the shape of a shell: shields, he realized, or rather, a cloaking device, such the kind he had heard rumours of but never seen himself.  Not it appeared to be failing, because as they watched holes began to appear, until the entire orb was ripped apart.  Underneath, was a ship of the same basic design as the Enterprise, but much larger and painted a non-reflective black: a model that he had never seen or heard of before.

“What the hell is that?” he muttered.                                     

The comm in his helmet crackled as Kirk answered, sounding exhilarated.  “ _That_ ,” he said, “is the _Vengeance”._

_“_ The _Vengeance_?”

 “A prototype warship,” Kirk said, “Dreadnought class. Designed by Khan himself, and built in secret on Titan.”

“My God,” Leonard whispered.  “What is he going to do with it?”

Kirk laughed in his ear. “That’s an easy one, Bones. That’s practically the only question we do know the answer to. Khan is going to use it to start a war.”

 

 

They drifted in space another quarter of an hour, during which time Leonard practiced his breathing and tried not to think about what it would be like to die, drifting, once the power cells of their suits ran out.  Kirk seemed unconcerned, though he refused to explain to Leonard exactly why. 

When Leonard felt the tingling in his hands and feet that signaled he was about to be transported, his first thought was that he was losing oxygen.  A moment later gold swam before his eyes, and he was back about the _Enterprise_ , in a transporter bay. Scotty was standing at the controls, looking nervous.  The doors to the bay were sealed shut, but someone was banging on them.

“Come on, then,” Scotty said to Kirk, “They’re on to us. Khan’s beamed over to the Dreadnought along with half his men. The First Officer’s in charge for now. Security caught me entering your coordinates” he nodded to the door. “But I managed to shut them out for another –say -30 seconds. Whatever you’ve got up your sleeve, man, you’d better do it fast.”

Kirk had run to join him behind the control panel. “Is this linked into the main computer?”

“Just like you asked.”

Security must have found their override, because the doors opened. The chief of security, along with several marines, pressed through, phasers locked on Kirk and Bones.

“We have them, sir,” said the Chief Security Officer, speaking into his comm.

From his vantage point on the transporter pad, Leonard could see Kirk’s hands passing rapidly over the controls.   Suddenly the lights in the transporter room, which had been dim, returned to their usual brightness.

“The virus appears to have been deactivated,” the First Officer’s voice came back over the comm.  “The ship’s functions are returning to normal.”

“Come on, Kirk,” growled the security officer. 

Kirk just looked at him and grinned. Leonard say him press his thumb down once, on the controls, before the security officer and all his marines were beamed away.

He and Scotty looked at each other, and then at Kirk.

“Where did they go?”  Leonard asked, frightened.

“Brig,” Kirk’s grin increased, “along with half the remaining officers and about a quarter of the crew. It’s a good thing these Imperial ships are so tight on security, isn’t it?”  He pressed another few controls and then spoke, loudly.

“Crew of the _Enterprise_ : this is a mutiny. I, James T. Kirk, have taken over your vessel. The First Office and those loyal to him have been placed in the brig. Everyone else is under my command.  If you disobey, you will be beamed directly to the brig.

My intention is to take this ship into Federation Space, where we will petition for asylum. Those who do not wish to do so will be left on Imperial outpost Gamma-74b. Kirk out.”

He switched off the comm.  “What do you think, Bones? Will they go for it?” 

Leonard shook his head.  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I suppose a lot of them would, if it meant a chance at freedom. Not that you’re giving them any other option. But I don’t see how…” he trailed off, nervously thinking of the Dreadnought looming over them. Kirk seemed to catch his drift.

“What did I tell you, Bones?” he asked. “Trust me, I have a plan.”

 

 

They made their way to the bridge: a strangely empty bridge. Most of the officers had been replaced by Kirk’s men: Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura in communications. 

“The Dreadnought is hailing us, Sir,” said Chekov smartly.

“On screen.”

Khan’s face appeared. When he saw Kirk’s face, his expression changed from one of annoyance to cold amusement.

“Oh, pet,” he crooned, “You’re still alive. What a charming surprise.” He looked down his noise at Kirk. “But what have gone and done now?”

Kirk swallowed, and then said, “Khan, it’s over.”

“You’ve taken over my ship, naughty boy,” Khan mused. “Well, it isn’t as though I need it anymore. But how - that virus – was it your work after all? Oh, James,” his voice was rich, “You’ve been holding out on me.”

Kirk didn’t reply, and after a pause, Khan sighed. “While I appreciate the entertainment, I don’t have any more time for games just now.  Release the officers and turn yourself over into their custody. When this is all over, I’m going to punish you severely.”

Kirk swallowed again.  “I’d rather die.”

“I’m sure you would,” Khan agreed pleasantly. “I know I’ve made you wish for death many times. But you and I both know that I’m the one who decides when your life will end.”

The screen went black. 

 

              

“What now?” Kirk muttered, under his breath.  Leonard and the other crew members looked at each other. “What now what now what now?”  Kirk was still muttering, faster and faster.

“You said you had a plan,” Leonard accused him.

Kirk turned around to look at him. His eyes were large and blue. “Yes!” He said. “Yes. _Now_ I have a plan.  Uhura,” he added, “hail the Klingon Commander.”

“Hailing Commander Tharf, Sir.”

“Who are you?”  The Klingon said, sneering at Kirk. “I just received a message from Captain Khan, telling me that his ship had been taken over by mutineers. In the Klingon Empire, such disobedience would be unthinkable.”

Kirk shrugged. “Commander Tharf. My name is Captain James T. Kirk. I have indeed taken control of this vessel, but it is not a mutiny as Captain Khan has claimed. I was placed aboard the _Enterprise_ by my commanding officer, Admiral Marcus, and on his orders I have commandeered it. Captain Khan is _not_ acting under the authority of our Emperor.”

“What do you mean?”  Tharf snarled.

Kirk smiled very slightly. “He led you to believe that this invasion was sanctioned by our high command, and that your actions would be reward with asylum within our Empire, did he not? Lies. He intended to deceive you into invading the Federation and then blame you for the resulting war.”

“That,” began Tharf, “dishonorable -”

“Unfortunately, we humans do not value honor as highly as your own species,” said Kirk. “In fact, it’s too late already.  I am sending you an encryption code now. Use it to decode the signals sent out by this ship in the past twenty-four hours, and you’ll find a message to Kronos that includes copies of every transmission between you and Khan over the past several months, as well as message to our high command,  in which you are never mentioned.”

Tharf paused, and the glanced over his shoulder. “See if he is telling the truth,” he ordered. He mashed his hand on his consol, howling with frustration. 

“I will destroy Khan for his treachery,” he warned.

“Then we are allies,” agreed Kirk. “But we must act immediately, because his ship is a risk to both our worlds. Kirk out.”

The screen returned to the view of space.  Every member of the rag-tag bridge crew watched in fascination as the three warbirds began charging their weapons, and moving into formation around the Dreadnought.

“Can they take him?” Leonard asked.

Kirk shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not with Khan in command. Mr. Sulu, prepare the photon torpedoes.”

“Sir?”

“Do it!”

The Dreadnought had some kind of weapon Leonard had never seen before: an energy beam that sliced one of the Birds of Prey in half, carving through its shields as those it was a Rigalian pleasure-cruisers. Leonard winced. Although the ship was too far away for him to see individual Klingons, he could imagine them dying: ripped apart by the explosion or sucked into space by the vacuum it left in its wake.

“They have the tetrapulse emitter online, then,” Kirk said to Gaila. She nodded grimly. “Send Tharf the specifications for the shield frequency shift,” he added.

“Yes, sir,” Gaila moved towards the science station, her fingers flying over the controls.

“Make sure our own shields are oscillating as well. Target their weapons array. Fire.”

The ship rocked back with the force of the first torpedo being discharged.

“Again,” Kirk ordered.

The shields of the dreadnought didn’t appear to be failing. Harried by the Klingons, their shots were diverted between the Birds of Prey and the _Enterprise_. Sulu seemed to be doing a masterful job of keeping the ship bucking and twisting, to avoid the blasts, but so Leonard felt that he could see the Dreadnought becoming more dangerous with each passing minute: targeting the ships more effectively with each new burst of fire. He supposed that the crew was trying out their toy for the first time. 

Then, the Enterprise rocked again underneath him. “We’ve been hit,” Chekov reported. ‘Shields at 60%. The engine of Warbird Two is destabilizing, we need to put space between us.”

“Go,” said Kirk, “Put everything you can towards the thrusters. Sulu, try to keep us above the Dreadnought: they can’t fire through their own ship to get to us.”

As Sulu turned the dreadnought turned too, matching them. Then the energy wave from the exploding Klingon ship sent the Enterprise momentarily adrift, and another blast nicked them.

“Launching photon torpedoes,” Sulu reported.

“Gaila, can you get a read on their shields yet?”

“They’re holding at 90%,” she said. “I’m sorry, sir, but their technology is a generation beyond ours.”

Tharf’s face reappeared on the screen.

“You intelligence has been confirmed,” he told Kirk. “Khan has betrayed me. If I return to Kronos now, it will be to fall on my sword, for the dishonor of having been tricked by a human. Better to die on the battlefield.”

The comm cut out again.

“How many torpedoes do we have left?”  Kirk asked Sulu.

“Eleven.”

“You can use ten,” he said. “Delay as long as you can.  Keep the last one in the tube, no matter what.  He turned to Leonard. “Bones,” he said, “I need your surgeon’s hands.”

 

 

The last bird of prey was coming around, a trail of red ionic dust streaming from one side, where the _Vengeance_ had succeeding in clipping its wing _._ As it came around, barreling towards the side of the dreadnought, Sulu kept them in position, and fired at a hard angle.  

Tharf succeeding in breaking through the shield, the physical action of the much smaller ship plowing into the larger one set of a chain of small explosions along the side of the dreadnought, followed by the larger explosion of the torpedoes that Sulu had fired only a moment later. 

“What did we hit?” Kirk asked.

“Navigation,” Gaila reported, “not weapons. Their shields are at 76%.”

An explosion rocked the vessel; Leonard fell to the floor, hitting his head against a console as he did so.

“Shields are at 15%,” Chekov said in a small voice.

“Mr. Sulu?”

“One torpedo left.”

“The _Vengeance_ is hailing us, sir.”

“On screen."

“Kirk!”  Khan’s eyes were wild and his hair was disordered. In the background, Kirk could see the members of his inner crew working frantically. Khan’s voice softened. “Members of my crew are dead, James. Men and women I’ve protected for over three hundred years.  You can’t possible know what that feels like.”

“I don’t” Kirk admitted. “I’ve only had my crew for forty minutes,” he looked around the room, “and it already feels like a lifetime.”

“Then you should all die together,” said Khan.

He seemed about to cut the comm, when Kirk stopped him. “Wait.”

Khan raised an eyebrow. 

“Take me,” said Kirk. “Spare the crew. They didn’t want to betray you, you know. I forced them to: they shouldn’t be killed for my mistake.”

Khan frowned. “You must know that I will kill them, James, whether or not I have you alive or dead.” He paused. “You swore you would die before you fell into my hands again.”

Kirk nodded slowly, allowing some of his fear, and some of his defeat, to show through on his face for the first time. “I did,” he said. “But… kill them quickly, and cleanly, and you will have me alive all the same.”

Khan looked at him for a long time.  “Lower your shields,” he said. “I’ll beam you aboard before I destroy the _Enterprise_.”

Kirk nodded.  He looked to Chekov. “Do it. That’s an order,” he added, when Chekov looked about to protest.

“Sir.” 

He looked around the bridge one last time: at Gaila and Scotty, two of the smartest and most determined people he had ever known, at Sulu and Chekov, and at Uhura. Bones was gone – still down in Engineering where Kirk had sent him, and he hoped now, more than ever, that he had been quick about his job.

“Lower shields,” he ordered Chekov again.

“Lowering shields, Sir.”

Jim waited for the rush of gold light, but it didn’t come. 

A moment later, the _Vengeance_ exploded.

 

 

“Tribbles!” Bones was still shaking his head about it, three days later. They had been drifting ever since the battle had ended, just inside the border between Imperial space and the neutral zone. Their warp core was too damaged to risk trying to move even on impulse. One set of thrusters were still working, Scotty reported – the one on the starboard nacelle - but the energy it would cost to run them was being diverted into life-support systems.  “How much were you feeding those little guys, anyway?”

“Oh, it wasn’t that much,” Kirk admitted.  “I just did the opposite of what you told me: fed them a couple times a day until I had about my weight in tribble, and then stuck to a more restricted feeding schedule afterwards. I do feel kind of bad about blowing them all up, though.”

“Hrmph,” Bones grunted. “You could have told me what you were planning, before you sent me down to Engineering to stuff tribbles up the backside of a photon torpedo. If that thing had gone off,” he shuddered, remembering. “And meanwhile, how did you make sure Khan’s ship didn’t lock on to you?”

“I broke into sickbay a couple of weeks ago, and stole that hypospray that you prepared for me.” Kirk grinned. “I’m a first generation augment, now: no more allergies, no more haemophilia, and very slightly better hearing and smell than I had before.”

Leonard laughed disbelievingly.

“That’s how the transporter works, you know,” Kirk said, “if done automatically instead of by a technician. If you’re already in the system, than it locks onto your genetic signature. Khan’s dreadnought had only 72 crew members aboard – after that crash with the Klingon vessel they were probably down to 40 or 50. There’s no way they would have had an engineer running the transporter room, just then.”

“Well, you have the devil’s luck, that’s all I can say,” Leonard shook his head again. “Thank you, Captain, for getting us out of there in one piece.”

“I’m not really a Captain,” Kirk pointed out.

“Sure you are.”

Scotty and Gaila had been working non-stop since the battle had ended: in another forty-eight hours they estimated that the ship would be repaired to the point where they could divert a little power towards limping across the neutral zone and towards the Federation outpost, where they would request asylum.

The crew was understandably still jumpy, but nevertheless the mood was optimistic.  They knew perfectly well that there were no Imperial warships within several days distance of them: perhaps a warship at full warp could reach them before they made it to the Vulcans, but if that was going to happen, it would have already.  The _Vengeance_ had been defeated without sending a warning hail back towards the Empire.

Early in beta shift McCoy was called to the bridge.

“Bones,” Kirk told him, “you’re going to want to see this.”

A Vulcan ship was approaching their coordinates.

“It was waiting for us,” Kirk explained, “hiding in the debris field near the red dwarf. As soon as we drifted out of Imperial space and fully into the neutral zone, it started towards us.”

The Federation ship soon dropped out of warp, and began powering on impulse towards the _Enterprise._

“They’re hailing us, Sir.”

“On screen, please, Uhura.”

Leonard had only really seen Vulcans in propaganda films: depicted as evil, snarling savages, or, with equal frequency, beaten, starved prisoners, emblems of the Empire’s supremacy.  This Vulcan was different, as of course he must be: a tall young man with black hair and olive skin. His eyebrows were slanted faintly upwards, and Leonard could just make out the infamously pointed ears.

“Spock!” Kirk sounded delighted.

The Vulcan’s eyebrows pinched together minutely.  “Greetings, James Kirk,” he held out one hand, fingers parted, in a greeting that Kirk mimicked. “The _Kir-Alep_ offers you safe passage to _Rok-Tor_.”

“Why are you always so formal,” Kirk moaned, instead of answering him. “Spock! It’s been so long! Great to see you!”

“I must request that you call me by my official title while I am on duty.”

Something about the way he said that convinced Leonard that this Spock had some kind of history with Kirk off-duty, as well. Unexpectedly, he felt a pang of jealousy.

“Wait,” he said, slowly, “you know each other?”

Kirk smiled sunnily.  “Well, you might say that. Spock here has helped me out a lot of times.”

“Your methods are regrettable as well as illogical,” snapped the Vulcan. “If you would not insist on putting yourself in difficult situations, my assistance would not be required so frequently.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Kirk waved airily. “He loves me, really. _Commander_ Spock here is what you might call my ‘handler’.”

“Do you mean…” Leonard was the one asking, but everyone aboard the bridge seemed equally curious. “Do you mean that you’re really a spy?”

“I prefer the word ‘freedom fighter’,” Kirk said. “I slip across the border now and then, and come back with a few refugees, or a few pieces of information. I’ve never come back with a ship before, though,” he added, looking around the bridge of the Enterprise with satisfaction.

“But you’ve been aboard the _Enterprise_ with Khan now for,” Leonard calculated quickly “… over a year now.” Everyone nodded.

“Well,” Kirk admitted, “sometimes these things take longer than others.”

 

 

The _Kir-Alep_ put the Enterprise into a tractor beam and began dragging them, at a steady pace, into Federation space.  They couldn’t go into warp, tethered like that, and so the journey took several days, until they reached the Vulcan outpost and faster transport could be arranged.

Most of the crew - even a good number of the crew members that Kirk had been forced to capture, rather than submit voluntarily -  had quickly decided to take the Vulcan’s up on their offer of resettlement within the Federation. Those who hesitated most were the ones with families back home but even most of them were leaning towards taking the Vulcans up on their offer, since the chances that they would be received well if they returned the Empire, were questionable at best. Spock, who had contact with Federation Intelligence, told them that at the moment it appeared that the Empire thought the Enterprise had been destroyed, in a border skirmish with the Klingons. The best option, it then appeared, was to try to keep their families safe, by letting everyone assume they had died in battle, rather than mutinied.

As soon as they reached _Rok-Tor_ Kirk was always busy, in closed-door meetings with one Federation officer after another. The Vulcan, Spock, was always at his side. Leonard wasn’t quite used to Vulcans yet: he had been raised in a xenophobic culture, he felt he deserved time to adjust. Finally, after a long day of paperwork, he managed to catch Jim alone, in the recreation lounge of the Rok-Tor. He was watching the Enterprise, which was docked on the same side of the station, being worked over by engineers.

“Now there’s a site I won’t be sorry to see the last of,” Leonard opened with.

Kirk laughed. “She’s a tough ship,” he said.

“The horse can’t choose its rider,” Leonard agreed.  He watched Kirk watching the ship for a few seconds before he asked. “What will you do now?”

“Same as ever,” Kirk said. “Go back in; try to see what I can do. All those people out there, Bones- they deserve better than this.  Do you know that humans invented democracy when Vulcans were still slitting each other’s throats in the desert? We have more potential as a species than we’ve had a chance to demonstrate so far.”

“We are what we expect of ourselves, I suppose,” Leonard mused. “Jim, why did you take me with you?”

Kirk gave him a funny smile. “Because you wanted to come?”

“Yes, I did, but what I mean is – why did you pull me aboard that shuttle with you? Why not just leave me on the Enterprise like you did with Chekov and the rest of them?”

Kirk looked at him for a few seconds, and then he coughed. “I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to impress you?” he added jokingly.

Leonard turned that over for a moment. “I hope you don’t mind my asking?” he asked, “but are you and that Vulcan – Spock - ?” 

Kirk raised his eyebrows, and then he started laughing.

 “Aw, never mind,” said Leonard, feeling his face going red.  “Forget I said anything.” 

They stood together a few minutes more, and then he added, “I’m going on the next transport to New Earth. Apparently they need doctors pretty badly, it didn’t take them long to place me at all.”

“Good for you,” said Kirk. “I’m glad.”

“Look me up some time,” Leonard said, awkwardly, “and - thank you for everything, Jim. Thank you for saving me. Thank you for taking me along.”

“No problem, Bonesy.”

 

 

New Earth was a peaceful planet, orbiting a sun that fell midway between Vulcan and Andor. There were no indigenous sentient species and the natural fauna was not unlike that of Earth’s during the Pleistocene. In the last century, Vulcan colonists had reshaped the ecosystem, but eventually found it too cool and wet for their taste, and moved on. And so, when a steady stream of human refugees had begun trickling into the Federation, the planet had been turned over for their use.  

The human colony was now just under twenty-five million inhabitants. They had set up a small city, but most of the colonists were involved in agriculture and lived in small, communal townships. The Federation had been generous in providing technology to automate the agricultural work, as well as in building health and educational facilities, and the planet was developing rapidly. While the small colony was not yet repaying the cost of its maintenance in exports, there was every chance that it would be able to do so within another five to ten years.  The largest challenge of New Earth was the retraining of the refugees who arrived, since more often than not the menial jobs they had held within the Imperial bureaucracy were meaningless in the new economy.

In this respect, Leonard was lucky, as his skill as a doctor made him useful anywhere. He applied to the colonial health service and was quickly accepted and placed in the settlement of New Alice Springs, which served as a hub to the surrounding farms. He was told that his work would mostly consist of curing colds and bacterial infections among the children, although there were occasional accidents related to the transition of city people to country life, as well. 

He had been settled just under three months when Jim Kirk found him.  He entered the simple clinic infirmary one afternoon after seeing off his last patient of the day, and found Kirk just sitting there, swinging his legs off the edge of the clinic’s only biobed.

“You!” Leonard said, trying to sound gruff but unable to keep himself from grinning, “didn’t think I’d see you again.”

“No?” Jim asked. “You don’t know me very well then, Bones.” 

Outside the clinic window, it was a hot, dry day. The colonists passing by on the street below wore light, white robes, Vulcan style, partially to protect themselves with the sun, and partially in sympathy with the dominant culture of the Federation.

“Come on,” Leonard said, “I’ve got something I’ve been saving for a day like this.”

Up on the top shelf of the bookcase he’d built in his new office, he’d hidden a bottle of bourbon that he’d received in payment from a new settler some weeks earlier. He prodded at the replicator until it produced ice cubes, and poured a generous quantity into two glasses.

“Cheers,” he told Kirk. 

“Cheers.”

They clinked their glasses together, and Leonard took a good, long sip of the bourbon, enjoying the pleasant way it burned his throat on the way down. He was glad now that he’d waited to open the bottle: earlier that week, after a bad day in the clinic, he’d been tempted to drink it alone.

“How are you settling in here?” Jim asked.

“New Alice? It’s alright. Alice is a bonza town.”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s a joke among the colonists here. It just means that it’s alright.”

“How are you settling in? Meeting people? Met anyone special yet?”

Bones tilted his glass back and forth, watching the ice cubes fall one way and then the other.  “I think I’m a little old for that,” he said. “How about you, Jim? You seeing anyone these days?” It occurred to him, not for the first time, then that he didn’t even really know if Kirk really liked men, or women, or both, or neither. Jim had always seemed sort of omni-sexual to Leonard, but that might have been a defense mechanism as much as anything else. He had only ever seen him with Khan anyway, a relationship that hadn’t exactly been built on mutual appreciation.

“I’ve got a girl,” Kirk said.

“Good for you,” Len said. “What’s her name?”

“the _Enterprise.”_

“What?”

“That’s my girl.  Have you heard of her? She used to be a warship in the Great meta-human Imperial fleet, but the Federation’s had her retrofitted, turned her into a vessel intended for stealth. State of the art cloaking device, best warp drive available for a ship of her class, and a top-of-the-line weapons system: all off the books, of course, and carefully disguised so that it can’t easily be traced back to the Federation. But they’re giving her to me, and I’m taking her back into the Human Empire.”

Jim was laughing now. Leonard realized that his mouth had fallen open. He closed it.

“You’re going back?” he asked.

“Just like I always have been, up until now, except that instead of just myself I’ll have a ship, and a crew. The Federation wants a lot of different things, you know: intelligence from inside the Empire, but also a ship to ferry out their operatives when things start to get hot for them, and to do a bit of sabotage on the side. And to tell the local populations that there’s a better way of life out there, if they’re ready to fight for it.”

Jim was brave, Leonard thought. How could someone waltz right out of the Empire, and then want to turn around and go back?  But on the other hand, how many times had Kirk done it before?

“Come,” said Jim.

“What?”

“Come with me. The Enterprise is going to need a chief medical officer. Even if it’s all top-secret and undercover, you’d still be the first human CMO of a Federation ship, what do you think of that?”

How could he? Leonard thought. He hadn’t been through a tenth of the things that Kirk had seen, and yet what he had seen had been enough to make him afraid, and tire him out, so much that he wasn’t suited to anything anymore, except a quiet life on a safe, backwater little colony.

Slowly, he shook his head. The movement seemed to convince Kirk, where a thousand words would have failed.

“Well,” said Jim, leaning back. “I had to try.”

“I’m glad you asked,” Leonard said. “It means a lot to me.”

“Well,” said Kirk. He smiled sunnily at Len. “I’ve done what I came here to do, but I’ve still until tomorrow at noon before the next transport leaves again. Care to show me around?”

Leonard took him to the one restaurant in town for a bit of supper. The woman who ran the place was a refugee originally from Virginia, so she cooked like what Leonard remembered. Then, as the sun began to sink in the sky, they set out walking in the fields beyond the town, so that Leonard could show Kirk the new irrigation system, and the botany experiments the colonists had going.

“It’s a challenge, of course,” he admitted. “No one knows what it’s like to be a member of a free society; we’ve been living under a totalitarian state for so many generations. The Vulcans have sent in all of these ‘advisors’ to help us reshape our society. Some people don’t like them, but the truth is that we need the help.

Kirk hummed in absent agreement, looking at the sunset. “It’s beautiful out here,” he said. “It reminds me of Iowa, when I was a kid.”

“You’re from Iowa?” 

“I was, for a while.”

They continued walking onwards as it grew dark. The air started to get cold quickly in the semi-desert climate.

“Come on,” said Leonard, finally turning back. “Are you staying at my place? I’m afraid it’ll just be a cot with a couple of quilts on top, but at least it’s warm.”

“Thanks, Bones.”

And then, in the dark, Kirk’s hand slipped over and into Len’s. Leonard stopped in surprise, turning around to look at Jim.

Whatever he had been about to say must have given Jim warning, because he spoke first. “I’m not very good at this,” he warned Len. “You know, I’ve done a lot of things, but… its never been what I really wanted.”

Leonard was shocked. Of all the things he had thought he would hear from Kirk –

“Jim” he said, “you’re beautiful. You’re literally the most amazing person I’ve ever met, and you have the whole universe in front of you.”

Kirk stepped closer into his space. “Does that include you?”

Leonard kissed him. And when Kirk kissed back, too hard and too aggressively, he pulled back a little, and made them continue more slowly. 

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back to my place.”

He thought this was something he could do for Jim: show him what it was like to have sex that wasn’t about power, or humiliation, or control. Show him that it could be warm, and funny, the two of them lying together in Leonard’s too-narrow bed, taking breaks from kissing every now and then to look up through Leonard’s skylight at the stars, while Kirk talked about the _Enterprise_ and what it would be like.

“Scotty’s coming as chief engineer, and Chekov too. It’s an experimental crew, something the Federation is trying out: half human refugees, and half Vulcans and Andorians. Do you remember that Vulcan lieutenant we met, Spock, the first one after we escaped from Khan? He’s going to be my first officer.  He was going to be promoted to Captain but they asked him to do this instead. He’s kind of a weirdo, Bones, he’s got this giant stick up his ass, but I think I can get him to loosen up a little.”

“Oh yeah?” Leonard said, reaching under the blankets to tickle Kirk’s side. “Like this?”

“I don’t think so,” Kirk said, turning on his side towards Len.  “Listen, I don’t want you to think that I’m sleeping with you in a last ditch effort to convince you to come-”

“Oh Gods,” said Len, throwing his head back. “Please say you aren’t.”

“Of course not,” said Kirk, opening his eyes wide. “But you know that if you were to change your mind,” he leaned in to kiss Leonard’s shoulder, “the Captain’s quarters have a full-sized bed and everything.”

“Luxurious,” Leonard muttered, and then an uncomfortable thought crossed his mind. “Are they-”

“The original Captain’s quarters have been converted into a lab for the long range sensors,” Kirk said. “The Federation values data collection a bit more than the Empire did. This is where the old First Officer’s quarters used to be.”

“That’s alright, then,” McCoy mused. “How do you do it?” he asked Kirk. “How do you put things behind you like that? How do you just move on?”

“I don’t,” Kirk shrugged, “I fight, as much as I can. That’s why I’ll never turn my back on the Empire, Bones. It’s like a demon, and as soon as you turn your back on a demon, that’s when it gets you. I can only move on as long as I keep moving forward.”

Leonard laughed. “We break our bones, but we get back up?”

“Yes,” said Jim, “because you heal them.”


End file.
